Randy David | PUBLIC LIVES

It will be 36 years this week since the Edsa people power revolution broke the Marcos dictatorship’s stranglehold on the Filipino nation. Many felt justified in calling it a miracle because it happened swiftly, and just when everyone was starting to despair that it might take a prolonged civil war to get rid of Marcos. … Read more

Sociologists who study modern society like to predict that the family — that realm of interpersonal intimacy — will have a diminishing role in the determination of an individual’s life. As societal functions become differentiated, they expect kinship to become increasingly irrelevant in politics, religion, business, the occupational system, etc. The end result of this … Read more

The “golden age” that I remember happened before Ferdinand Marcos became president in 1965. Indeed, I’d say Marcos presided over its dying years. In 1972, nearing the end of his second term, he assumed dictatorial powers by exploiting a provision in the 1935 Constitution. Conjuring a vision of a “New Society,” he then replaced that same … Read more

At least once every six years, we are invited to dream that enduring social change is, at last, within sight. And that a great deal depends on the person we elect to be the country’s next president. If we choose well, so the line goes, our country and our people will be on the path … Read more

Before my brother Dante was intubated in October last year, he made two hurried calls from the emergency room. The first was to our brother Ambo, the priest, to ask for his blessing and prayers. The second was to me, the eldest of the David siblings, to let me know he had agreed to be … Read more

On Friday this week, the Department of Health reported a record high of 37,207 new COVID-19 cases. Nearly one out of two PCR tests administered yielded a positive result. In barely two weeks, cases shot up from about 400 a day in late December to more than 30,000 by the second week of January. If … Read more

From that day in November 2021, when it was first identified in a South African lab, the SARS-CoV-2 variant named Omicron has cast a frightening shadow on a world already brought down to its knees by the deadly Delta variant. Featuring about 30 mutations, it showed an amazing capacity to evade the body’s first line … Read more

At the start of a new year, toward the end of your life, and in the midst of a pandemic, it is difficult not to feel anxious about time. You realize that life is absurdly short relative to the list of things you have set out to do. After 60, every passing year seems shorter … Read more

Two things were particularly striking in the way Supertyphoon “Odette” (international codename: Rai) hacked its ways through Northern Mindanao, the Visayan group of islands, and the Mimaropa region last week. The first is that it came almost at the end of the year, way past the usual typhoon season of June to November. The second … Read more

It’s important to bear in mind that the average person does not remember the past the way a historian does. He or she is less interested in what “really” happened in the past, than in images that bring the past and the present together in a single meaningful constellation. Therefore, it is often futile to … Read more